One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)(72)

“Osiris?” she asked, obviously baffled.

“It’s difficult to explain.”

Again, she gave him that patient, friendly silence.

So he explained, and found it wasn’t so difficult after all. “I’d been trying to learn more about Juno’s early years, to see if there might be something else to calm her, or someone else she once trusted. A groom, a jockey perhaps. It wasn’t easy, so many years after the fact. But I found the farm where she’d been bred to racing age, and the old stable master was pensioned but still living nearby. He remembered her, of course. He told me she’d always been difficult—no surprise—but that in her second year she’d formed a strong bond with an orphaned colt. Horses are much like people, you see. They form friendships and often remember one another, even if parted. We once had a pair of geldings who’d been separated for years, but once they …”

He stopped, absorbing the fact that her blue eyes had grown wide as shillings. God, he knew this would sound ridiculous spoken aloud.

“So this colt that she bonded with … it was Osiris?”

“Yes.” He tapped his heel defensively. “I know it sounds absurd, but it was the only possibility I could think of. Juno’s never socialized well with the other horses here. But I thought if she’d bonded with Osiris in her early years, before the horrific abuse she endured, perhaps she’d warm to him again and have some companionship to … to soothe her.”

They stared at one another for a while.

“So …” She pursed her lips around the drawn-out word. “This is why you’re pursuing Osiris. You’re willing to spend tens of thousands, rearrange your life, risk the fortunes of others—including my own brother—all so your ill-tempered mare can be reunited with her childhood friend?”

“Yes.”

The surprise in her expression suggested she’d been expecting him to protest, but really … Amelia was a clever woman. She had it pegged. He hadn’t anything else to say.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, I put your brother in insurmountable debt just to buy my old, crotchety horse a consort. Make of it what you will.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you what I make of it.” She closed the distance between them, step by slow, deliberate step. “Spencer … Philip … St. Alban … Dumarque. You”—she jabbed a finger in the center of his chest—“are a romantic.”

The air left his lungs. Damned inconvenient, that—because bloody hell, if ever there was an accusation he needed the breath to refute …

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You are. I’ve seen your bookshelves, and all those stormy paintings. First Waverley, now this …”

“It’s not romanticism, for God’s sake. It’s … it’s simple gratitude.”

“Gratitude?”

“This horse saved me, as much as I saved her. I was nineteen, and my father had died. I’d spent my youth bashing about the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly I was here, preparing to inherit a dukedom. I was angry and unfocused and out of my element, and so was this horse, and … and we tamed one another, somehow. I owe her a debt for that.”

“You’re only making it worse, you know.” She smiled. “Keep talking, and I might just deem you a sentimental fool.”

He was about to object, but then her hand flattened and crept inside his coat. The bronze fringe of her eyelashes fluttered as she leaned forward. Her br**sts pressed against his chest, soft velvet on the surface and softer still beneath. Perhaps he should rethink his disavowals. Really, he had no objection to this.

He put a finger under her chin and tilted her face to his. And then, because it suddenly seemed he should have had a reason to do that, he asked her, “You know all my names?”

“Yes, of course. From the parish register.”

He froze, recalling the image of her poised over that register, quill in hand, peering down at it for long, agonizing moments. He’d thought she was having misgivings, and she’d merely been memorizing his name. Some emotion ballooned inside him, hot and dizzying and much too vast for his chest to contain it. And for a moment, Spencer wondered if he just might be a sentimental fool after all.

“It was just …” Her voice broke as he slid his hand along the smooth, delicate flesh of her neck. “You already knew my middle name.”

“Claire,” he murmured.

Her pulse leapt against his palm.

Smiling a little, he lowered his lips to hers. “It’s Claire. Amelia Claire.”

Ah, the sweetness of this kiss. The softness, the warmth. The soul-shaking beauty of it. He took her mouth tenderly, and her arms slid around his chest under his coat, and … and oh, God. This was so, so different from any of their kisses since they’d wed. They hadn’t kissed standing up since they’d shared that first incendiary embrace in her brother’s study, and deuce if he knew why not. When they kissed like this, it emphasized how small she was against him. He had to bend his head to reach her lips, shore her up with his arms so his kiss wouldn’t send her stumbling back on her heels. When he held her this way, she felt delicate and breakable in his arms. And he knew Amelia was anything but fragile, but for some loutish, deeply male reason he liked pretending she was. Cradling her tight against him, giving her the heat of his body, inclining his head to cherish her lips with the softest, most tender of kisses … as though her mouth were a delicate blossom and those dewy pink petals would scatter if he dared breathe too hard. As though he needed to be very, very careful.